Visiting artist is a native of the Twin Cities area

By Tucker Henderson

Reporter

Kate Bredeson, a native of Hopkins, Minn., joins the scores of artists who have been accepted to the New York Mills Artist Retreat. She will be spending over the next few weeks working on the final touches of an eight-year project.

Bredeson, who is a self-declared dramaturg and playwright, specializes in theater history and storytelling. She is a theater professor by trade and currently lives in Portland, Ore. She is working on a four volume series of diaries written by Living Theater founder, Judith Malina.

“I am a theater historian,” said Bredeson. “I teach theater history, playwriting, directing and gender in theater and other things. I’m working on a very large project to edit the diaries of a German-American theater director named Judith Malina. She left hundreds and hundreds of very detailed diaries. She wrote almost everyday and they outline her life, but also the life of her theater company that she cofounded with her husband in New York.”

Bredeson went on to say that the theatrical work of the Malinas and their theater troop were in full force in the 50s and 60s and many of their plays surrounded anti-war and anti-nuclear testing themes as the couple were pacifists.

“I have spent the past eight years finding these diaries, reading them, and pulling portions from them to publish,” Bredeson said. “I’m sort of at the end of the project now and am writing introductions and working on annotating the individual volumes. When (Malina) mentions a name, I’ll put a little footnote to say who that was so that everybody can read and enjoy it. I’ll be turning them into the publisher next spring, so this is kind of the final stage of the project.”

Bredeson’s interest in Judith Malina came from authoring her first book, which chronicles the history of the role of theater during the student and worker protests in France in 1968. Malina and her theater group was in France at the time of the protests and became large figures in Bredeson’s book as they were the only Americans and almost the only non-French characters in the entire work.

“I became really interested in her and her vision for using theater to make the world better,” said Bredeson. “She and her company are the focus of that last chapter and I interviewed her for the book and just felt transfixed by her. She was an actress too and she’s very electric as a person.”

Bredeson said that her involvement in the project was very coincidental and had to do with the fact that she teaches at the college where Malina’s son attended years before she became a teacher.

“I think it was 2015 when her son was looking for somebody to take on the project of editing these diaries,” said Bredeson. “So they reached out to my grad school, Yale, where the theater company had some ties because they performed there and actually got arrested there. The Dean of the Drama School reached out to my faculty and asked if they knew anybody and because of my work, they selected me.

“We had this amazing night,” she continued. “It was me, Malina’s son and her archivist and we were all in New York at a restaurant. I met them and they were talking about the project and I was so overwhelmed and it was very exciting and I agreed to do it.”

Bredeson’s love for theater first came while attending Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. where she started out as a French major and expanded to a double major in theater.

“I had these really dynamic professors, Beth Cleary and Sears Eldredge, and they were the ones who really taught me that every play is a way to learn about a subject in history,” she said. “When I would take directing class with Beth, I would direct a 10 minute excerpt from a play, but I would read every book I could find about the person who wrote the play. I just wanted to know everything so that was sort of the entry point for me.”

Bredeson had aspirations of acting, but she quickly realized that she wasn’t a terrific actor and that her passion was actually found in the history and storytelling behind the art form, rather than the spotlight.

So far, the artist’s time in NY Mills has been a positive one. She was able to host her former theater professors for a short visit and has taken in all the sights and sounds of Maplewood State Park while the leaves are turning color, something she was looking forward to when she applied for the residency.

“I’ve been on a few different writing and artist residencies and I saw NY Mills listed,” she said. “I’m originally from Minnesota, so that was a lot of the draw, but this is a part of Minnesota I’d never spent any time in. So I was just excited about coming back to Minnesota and coming to a part of the state that I didn’t really know at all. I read about the Cultural Center and it just sounded pretty astonishing and I was excited about that. I just love Minnesota and I don’t ever get to come here this time of year, so it’s very nice to be here.”

Bredeson has also made a trip to Turtle River Lake near Bemidji, Minn., which hosts most of the villages in the Concordia Language Villages program, where she attended summer camp at Lac du Bois, where she first got her interest in France and the French language.

“I was also a counselor there and I hadn’t been back there since 1993 and I just drove up and they happened to be open,” said Bredeson. “So, I walked around and had lots of feelings. It was really beautiful and then I went to town and saw Paul and Babe. That was really special because it was a place when I was a kid that had a lot of importance to me.”

In her free time, Bredeson has been able to meet some of the people around the community, including stops at the Farmer’s Market, Cultural Center and Senior Cente, where she recently held a presentation on diaries and their preservation.

“We ended up having this marvelous conversation about diaries and diary keeping and what to do about all the boxes of stuff. Then one woman told us about burning her diaries, which was amazing,” she laughed. “My love of history and storytelling is behind all of my work. What can we learn about the time period in which Malina was living and making through her theater?”

In the coming weeks, Bredeson will be working on the annotating and introductions needed for her four volumes, but will make sure to continue to participate in the many programs in and around the community while she’s here.

“I’m just very impressed by this Cultural Center and the amount and quality of programming,” she said. “I’m going to tell everybody in the Twin Cities and beyond about it because it’s a really cool place.”